Think Q 2017 attendees, back of Thomas J. Watson Research Center auditorium
Think Q 2017 attendees, front of Thomas J. Watson Research Center auditorium
Photo by IBM Fellow Charles Bennett
Last week at our third Think Q conference at the Thomas J Watson Research Center, industry and academic leaders in quantum computing met to tackle questions about how to bridge the divide between the theory of quantum algorithms and practical applications that can run on today’s approximate (non-fault tolerant) quantum computers.
The conference talks, panels, tutorial workshops, and poster sessions addressed: How can we harness an approximate quantum computer’s advantage over classical systems? How do we sufficiently protect quantum computers from noise? How do we use them to solve computational problems of interest? And can this all be achieve without incurring large overheads such as those required for fault-tolerant quantum computation?
Over the next few years, we’re not going to have fault tolerance, but we’re going to have something that should be more powerful than classical – and how we understand that is the difficulty. – Jay Gambetta, quantum information and computation manager, IBM Research
Our program was packed with scientific talks on quantum algorithms, quantum error mitigation and error correction, quantum chemistry, classical simulation and verification methods, and more – which you can watch, below. We closed with a fascinating panel discussion, Quantum computing before fault tolerance, with Google’s Dave Bacon, University of Maryland’s Andrew Childs, Cambridge University’s Richard Jozsa, Duke University’s and IonQ’s Jungsang Kim, NASA’s Eleanor Rieffel, IBM Research’s Matthias Steffen, which was moderated by Dario Gil, vice president of AI and IBM Q.